Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines (DX9)

[heady magnet]

The shiny modification is needed, how do i acquire it? :c

Do lay bare the path to the canvas-painter.

[left grove]

oh

[heady magnet]

Also, dropping the malkavian talk, what about dgvoodoo? ;o

Would that be of help?

[left grove]

https://github.com/CattoSalad/VTMB-RTX-Remix this is all we have thus far

as a way to get started with it

[heady magnet]

❤️

[left grove]

not sure about dgvoodoo

[heady magnet]

Thanks, i'll see what i can contribute!

[left grove]

but there are no assets there yet, just basic configurations for now

[heady magnet]

Also i can't wait for bloodlines 2.

Even if people call it bad i'd still play it.

:3

[left grove]

yeah... mixed feelings with the latest delay, but oh well. Hope it's polished and a good game I am definitely playing it

#remix-beginners-guide message this is also helpful to try out the latest versions of the rtx runtime. I need to get this on the repo

[amber atlas]

Dgvoodoo is now included with the latest UP but it breaks remix. Dgvoodoo gets run automatically and modifies the d3d9 dll when you run it. Before you run the game for the first time you should actually get rid of dgvoodoo.

Was something I meant to talk to you about @left grove

We need to add something about that to the GitHub instructions

[left grove]

I recall that, you mentioned bypassing it

yeah we can do that

[amber atlas]

As far as an actual fix for water I haven't gotten anything working there yet. I'm afraid we might need some deeper support there. But I'm not sure just yet

[left grove]

I can open a ticket, if there isn't one already

[amber atlas]

I'm not quite sure what to write other than, "Water doesn't work." lol, I wanted to do a couple more tests on it, since I haven't looked super deeply.

I noticed it's not really selectable in my current setup with the texture tagging system, I haven't checked any of my captures with it in a while to see what's going on in the remix tool itself. So it's possible there is some recourse there.

What I'd like to have happen is to just be able to select it in remix and replace it with some pbr materials as a start.

Past that I think it would need something special like either the classic dual normal maps that scroll opposite directions trick...

[left grove]

I can experiment with it, but I'll try some crappy texture for the time being

[broken scaffold]

Simple water fix I did for DM: find the material of the water and change the shader type

UnlitGeneric always works in the VMT

That gets the texture to at least load on the game

Then you can remix it

[amber atlas]

awesome, thanks for that, I'll give it a shot!

[amber atlas]

Used one of the cheap water vmt's from Psycho-A, so when remix is off it just looks realllll bad lol

right now just a really low roughness on it

no normals or anything

not sure about getting the animated part working though

[dawn ivy]

3ds Max trial expired on me and I have to make sure my budget will make it until next payday before I pay for a year(discounted) I haven't got a good render to a flat map yet but here is what I am sitting at rendered in Iray in substance. Feedback appreciated.

[left grove]

it's looking good!

[amber atlas]

Was actually just typing the same, it's really shaping up!

[left grove]

Yeah could we see it ingame? this one looks a bit blocky when I zoom in haha

[amber atlas]

I think you might want to look into adding some edge wear discoloration on the flaps, most of the time these textures show up in pretty ambient dark areas and the way that sort of rubber wears it gets slightly lighter so that will help it pop even in low light conditions.

But this is really coming together great job!

[left grove]

I won't lie I never seen these flaps in my life

and look on the left, towards the bottom they have like a line across a few too in case you need extra inspiration

[broken scaffold]

O yeah we cooking

I have a sample of the animated water I'll send later

It's very simple

I think you just add a param

[amber atlas]

Oh nice I'll check that when you send it

Thanks!

[broken scaffold]

And I didn't forget about the skinning, I had just had to take a trip out this weekend unexpectedly so I didn't work on it. I'll be looking at it today

[amber atlas]

These vmt changes would have to ship with whatever packaged remix mod is sent out correct?

[amber atlas]

Just gives me more time to make characters to test with ;3 no rush!

[broken scaffold]

Yep that's how we have it sent out. If your mod loader supports content folders per mod then you should stick it in there otherwise when people uninstall remix they may perma fuck their textures

Ala voodoo

[amber atlas]

We have to integrate over the unofficial patch. I think that loader it includes might let us do that but I'll have to look into it. Otherwise it would have to be manually which could definitely be a bit of friction for the user

[left grove]

it can always be done through scripts... but not sure we want to have a bunch of stuff the user has to run

[amber atlas]

Yeah the lowest impact we can have. It's already lots of steps just to play it normally:(

Also whatever fixes I end up doing for water and custom textures to make it happen we can integrate into the main branch as well for vtmb repo so remix water just works out of box with the hashes/replacements

Vmts issue notwithstanding

[dawn ivy]

I have a pile of reference pics on my phone lol. Found some that were very close while searching weathered and abandoned loading dock.

[dawn ivy]

Yeah I need either pay up for max or get blender installed so I can get it rendered to texture

[left grove]

just a render would be nice to be fair

[neat spindle]

If you want, I can give you one of my Blender files that I set up to bake a heightmap from so you can copy the settings for your own purposes. It's relatively simple.

[dawn ivy]

My head didn't feel like dealing with another 3d modeling interface, I just used my work phone to extend my max trial for now. Got my texture baking sorted out and actually looking good now. I will share an in-game render once I have done some more tweaking. Trying to find the right middle ground as to not clash with game art vs reality is a bit of a pain. In reality the game texture coloring is way off and I haven't seen a single reference image of those flaps in anything brownish but I would like to keep it as close to original coloring and blend as possible so I am probably going to do some more dirt layer and fading on them and try to give them a little more edge wear detail like suggested.

[amber atlas]

I'd say the og texture reads as black flaps with a lot of dust and dirt and grime. Not as brown flaps. That's how I approached it, just covered up the flaps in lots of wear and tear and dust

[dawn ivy]

Decided I was polishing a turd and going back from scratch now that I am a bit less incompetent, Going to be a lot of splines getting extruded in the near future,

[dawn ivy]

basic model semi finished. If I ever finish I am probably going to get ptsd everytime I see this damn thing....It's been good practice. I have learned to cheat whenever possible using extruding splines, path deforms and boolean whenever possible.

[amber atlas]

i haven't opened max in agggessss

nostalgic to see the viewport again

also nice i was doing that spline technique on a different texture i was messing around with, pretty painstaking but it can be very accurate

[dawn ivy]

Yeah. Extruding them to use as boolean cutters works well as well.

[grave flower]

@amber atlas

Check the latest commit

[left grove]

#github-updates message this?

[neat spindle]

Does that mean no more getting flashbanged when you try to feed?

[amber atlas]

oooohhhh

i mean at the very least better captures i think?

i'll try it out

[left grove]

Would be nice honestly

[amber atlas]

ill test and if it fixes i'll close the ticket i opened

i'll test both cases, the ultra bright level lights and the feed/muzzleflash lights

[left grove]

I am away for this weekend but let me know if you need anything or even to celebrate anything it fixes. I'll keep an eye on here

[amber atlas]

sounds good, i'll keep you all posted, @neat spindle if you want to check it out too and double confirm, i have fixed manually a lot of the ultra bright level lights on my end, so im going to have trouble tracking some down

i know the theatre intro has a few

and i know the sabaat railyard level also has one in the starting area

[left grove]

Intro and feeding would already be huge

[amber atlas]

i already fixed the intro on mine D:

haha

i might just open the tool and revert it to test

[neat spindle]

I can check when I get home tonight. First step is trying to fix my install, it sounds like updating the bridge is what broke it from what Kunzinator was saying.

[amber atlas]

oh shiii

well no pressure from here!

things got out of hand

so there is a new control, and its set really high (i reduced it here) and still was able to maintain the look i wanted

however, it really doesn't cover the feeding light and the muzzleflashes, i'd have to set this so low that the environment lights would be nonexistent

however i do think this fixes the other issue of mega bright lights in the level that currently exist

though:

its a lot nicer

with suppress light keeping turned on they go away, and it makes the muzzleflashes more maneagable

[neat spindle]

Does the setting affect lights that have been overridden by Remix too?

It sounded like it was only supposed to affect converted lights

[amber atlas]

no this affects lights globally

if i set it to something tiny the level becomes dark

[neat spindle]

Hmm, okay. Well if we find a setting that works we can rescale our lights to match fairly easily.

[amber atlas]

im wondering about that, since its a global cap, we need it at least high enough to let the lights actually be bright, which so far is feeling around 10000.0

lower than that it will really mute the range of lighting

i will say with this + supress light keeping, it really is quite a lot nicer, but the volumetrics still linger which is an issue too

[neat spindle]

I think most of the lights I've placed have been around 1-2000 so that cap shouldn't be unreasonable.

How does it interact with changing scale instead of lumens?

[amber atlas]

not sure, i'm also not sure what unity max intensity is doing, is it lumens? maybe?

[neat spindle]

IIRC when I was doing my lighting changes the default scale the lights were set at was way too high.

[left grove]

I mean tbf this is what I would think the Devs wanted 🤔 like usually we can barely see the rest anyway. This also makes it more hardcore when feeding with pedestrians walking around

[amber atlas]

yeah its a LOT closer to the ranges I was imagining

muzzle flashes still pretty rough

[left grove]

Nice

Eh still, gives a more exaggerated effect when shooting

Maybe fitting for a world of darkness

[amber atlas]

i'd like to reduce the likelyhood of epileptic risk for users personally

[left grove]

Ok true

[amber atlas]

i think giant flashing screen during combat is both a usability and accessbility issue haha

i have a friend who i could never show this to, she would actually have a seizure pretty much immediately

non ray traced its not intense it just really lights up the characters and so its not a big flashing screen

it really only lights up super close in a really tight sphere in non rtx

[left grove]

I wonder if we can have some ignore just for that one

[amber atlas]

i dont think spawned lights have stable hashes D:

[left grove]

But that may be an unfortunate thing about guns and lights 🥲

How does half life 2 handle this?

[amber atlas]

worst part

this console command doesnt work

otherwise we could just launch it as a +muzzleflash_light 0

and be ok

i think hl2's muzzleflash light command works and thats probably what they are doing?

[neat spindle]

Lmao typical

[amber atlas]

right?!

XD

[neat spindle]

I love how a solid half of the console commands are nonfunctional even though they're in the game

[amber atlas]

haha yeah

oh darn the screenshot didnt capture the debug spheres for the lights

the mac10 actually spawns TWO lights D:

one for the third person and one for the first person views

[neat spindle]

That explains a lot actually

[amber atlas]

also unrelated but

here's my mac10 floating at the origin

i tried some tricks to anchor it to the skinned mac10 that... did not work XD

if you turn on light debugging it givesd you a little readout when you look at the lights and tells you the hash, it is different every time i fire

so we can't do anything to the muzzleflashes

not this way

[neat spindle]

Just call it Tremere blood magic and call it a day 😛

[amber atlas]

lol

also confirming the muzzleflash light intensity is a bit randomized but its range averages around 3000 to 4000 intensity :/

actually it gets up to 10k sometimes

[neat spindle]

I'd guess it probably has a high scale, then. Check one of your captures and see what that's set at for a normal light.

[amber atlas]

you mean the radius?

[neat spindle]

Yeah

[amber atlas]

its 5

the readout reports that as well

[neat spindle]

Okay, yeah, that's way too high. IIRC its not supposed to stray very far from 1.

[neat spindle]

Radius has an exponential effect on light intensity

[amber atlas]

almost all lights are captured at 5 then the radiance is set fairly low

[neat spindle]

Yep, exactly.

I can't remember the exact reason, but IIRC having light radius too high like that causes problems, which is why we were rescaling lights and then finding new intensity values.

But it sounds like we may not have a choice in the matter because of these dynamic lights

[amber atlas]

i think the main issue is that it clips with nearby geo and makes those inside out circle shadows on the wall right?

[neat spindle]

That shouldn't be the case because these are "real" lights with intensity set at a point of origin rather than the typical fake lights that are just spheres (I know this is oversimplifying)

[amber atlas]

well i mean, you can go see them do that

if you have a high radius light and that radius intersects a surface

[neat spindle]

In Remix? I could have sworn when I was trying to light the chandelier in Confession that the radius didn't actually cast the light as a sphere.

But it's entirely possible I'm misremembering

[amber atlas]

its also possible it only previews them like that in the tool and calcs them differently in game

[neat spindle]

Hmm, that is possible.

[amber atlas]

hell you schooled me on the hash ids so im real cautious now ;3

[neat spindle]

Let me know, haha. Because you're definitely right in traditional rendering about the clipping, but RT has a lot of oddities

[amber atlas]

true true

[dawn ivy]

Yeah if it's the same issue I had just copy the release 5.4 bridge files back in and you should be good to go.

[neat spindle]

I wonder how difficult it would be to add a universal scaling feature for radius like the one that was implemented for intensity. Because a lot of our problems come from all the lights in the game having a radius of 5.

[amber atlas]

Anyone run into freezes in Remix runtime that result in this output:

[12:18:44.966] err: DxvkSubmissionQueue: Command submission failed: VK_ERROR_DEVICE_LOST

It has been happeing pretty frequently where lots of my work is centered which is concerning...

[cyan stone]

I'm constantly getting this error when I try to run the game. Do you have any suggestions how can I fix it?

[amber atlas]

I've definitely gotten that one before, I THINK it's when I end up running too many things other than the game + remix and it runs out of video memory, but I'm not sure, when it crashes you can check the logs

Vampire_d3d9.log in the main vampire folder has some useful stuff

[cyan stone]

Thanks for the prompt reply! Unfortunately I'm not that versed in this stuff and I'm not able to interpret the log accurately myself. :/ Is it OK if I upload it here?

[amber atlas]

sure i can take a look but I bet I'll be fairly stumped myself 😄

[cyan stone]

Haha, thanks nevertheless! 😄

[amber atlas]

you aren't getting any errors

theres another log called d3d9.log that might have some clues

but i'm guessing it's probably a vram issue

usually bridge fails when it runs out of memory

[neat spindle]

"d3d9.maxAvailableMemory = 1024"

Almost definitely a VRAM shortage

[amber atlas]

mine actually says that too, what does your say @neat spindle ?

[neat spindle]

Oh, weird, mine also says that

What GPU do you have, @cyan stone ?

[cyan stone]

I have RTX 3070 running on 2560x1440, was hoping I wouldn't have any issues. 😕

[amber atlas]

I have a 3080 over here with 10gb so I'm curious what's going on there...

[neat spindle]

Hmm, okay, so horsepower's not the issue, then. I've got a 2080 Super which is roughly equivalent to your card

[amber atlas]

i mean if its capping it at 1024 here, that's odd, i also dont think its accurate

let me check the readout in game

[neat spindle]

When installing Remix did you just use the 0.5.4 release or did you try to update your DXVK and/or bridge afterwards?

[amber atlas]

im not sure what that log is representing but remix itself is detecting the right amount of available ram in the panel at least

[cyan stone]

I tried to follow these instructions:

[neat spindle]

So on the step where you grab "rtx-remix releases" which one did you download?

[cyan stone]

I downloaded the 0.5.4. release and put it in the main game folder.

[neat spindle]

Okay, I think you may need to manually update your DXVK to a more recent version, IIRC I also had some issues getting 0.5.4 to work

#1144151168830939280 message

Then just click on the most recent one at the top

And download this file:

After that, drop the contents of the archive into your .trex folder, overriding existing files

[dawn ivy]

5.4 dxvk ran fine for me out of the box

[cyan stone]

OMG, thank you so much, it acctually worked!!! 😮 😄

[dawn ivy]

hmm guess I must have gotten lucky on that

[cyan stone]

I've updated both the dxvk and bridge to be sure.

[dawn ivy]

Now you can enjoy the wonders of raytracing with funky lights and flashhbang feeding! 😄

[neat spindle]

Updating the bridge didn't break it for you?

[cyan stone]

Indeed I can in glorious 20fps. xD

[cyan stone]

It fixed it. xD Didn't work before that.

[dawn ivy]

updating bridge broke it for me if I remember right but, it ran on both 5.4 and updated dxvk. updated dxvk fixes fullscreen so it doesnt crash on startup

[neat spindle]

Bizarre. When I try to update the bridge it breaks my install, haha

[dawn ivy]

maybe new bridge update has fixed that since we tried

I will have to see if new bridge still breaks my install later

[cyan stone]

Well I updated both dxvk and bridge at the same time before launching the game and it worked.

[neat spindle]

When you installed the new bridge where did you put it?

[cyan stone]

Base game folder.

[neat spindle]

Huh, okay, so maybe it is fixed now, then.

Thought there was a chance you dropped it in .trex and it wasn't actually doing anything, haha

[cyan stone]

I read the instructions carefully. xD

[dawn ivy]

I was browsing commits yesterday and did see one for fixing some crash recently I think...

[amber atlas]

I think my crash is related to the windows D: but I'm not quit sure what I did, going to keep troubleshooting it

in the meantime

drain decal

i added one of those fitting metal rings around it to ground it a little better

[dawn ivy]

Nicely done. I hit a need to walk away point earlier in the night and relinquished my computer chair back to my disgruntled cats.

[amber atlas]

I feel that. Stepping away is always a good to do periodically as well

Also not sure if I can confirm it yet, but I think that my windows are what's locking the game up, it... consistently when I look in the direction of them it just hard locks

can't seem to get any of the logs to reflect that

but i have in the past seen micromap opacity stuff just requesting GOBS og vram

like more than computers can have right now

so i'm wondering if there's either
a) a memory leak,
b) i've done something to the windows on my end thats crashing things

[neat spindle]

Did you make a new mesh for the windows with separate opaque and transparent materials?

[feral siren]

Did you try experimenting on the scene unit scale?

[amber atlas]

I have not actually... let me check that out

[amber atlas]

Yes, I have the window frames as meshes + another anchored mesh for the planes

[feral siren]

In the game the thing & vietcong, it affects the light radius when I set it lower

I mostly set them to 0.04 or 0.004

Light radius does affect the light intensity and the other param I forgot.

[neat spindle]

Just realized that Mark already implemented the light radius thing I was talking about. Set that to 1 and see how the muzzle flashes look

[neat spindle]

That looks about right. It's still large, but no longer flashbang bright

[amber atlas]

lol

nah

the volumetrics stay behind as well

so theres just haze in the air in a rectangle until you look away or move away

[feral siren]

Did it improve or still the same?

[amber atlas]

this is in non remixed, pretty much only the gun lights up and just the immediate surrounding sphere so if you are standing super close to a wall or whatever

radiance values for muzzleflash lights are still maxing out

they go over 100k if they are allowed

even with radius of 1

[feral siren]

What about the scene unit scale? Did it improve?

[amber atlas]

about to do that one

though im wary of changing the scene scale, since they used portal as the calibration for it, and vtmb is also on source

but i'll do it right now

makes everything near pitch black which is what i was worried about

sorry near black on the lights

still enough ambient to see

[feral siren]

You can calibrate it

Try other values. Maybe it is too small

[amber atlas]

Yeah this dang muzzle flash is just too bright compared to all the other sources, the delta between the values is just too large :/

anything I do to adjust it, the muzzleflash is just so much brighter

its cumulative too

so i can fill the street up with the volumetrics from the light the longer i shoot

[feral siren]

That's too bad. Maybe the api is your last resort for that.

[amber atlas]

Thanks for trying though, I appreciate it.

[feral siren]

Is the cumulative light not fixed by suppress light keeping?

[amber atlas]

in this case i had supress light keeping on and it was still accumulating

even with when the light goes away quickly or near instantaneously, the volumetrics stay behind :/

if you walk awayfrom them, the shape of your sceen is left hanging in the air then fades

[neat spindle]

I don't seem to be having that issue with the volumetrics hanging, not sure what in your settings is causing that

[amber atlas]

what are your light settings?

[amber atlas]

let me check out what i got going on in that panel

[neat spindle]

Here's my light translation settings

[amber atlas]

my volumetric settings are the same

something odd is going on either way, the lights are not going away at all

they are sticking around

[neat spindle]

Yeah, I just have a noticable ghosting where you can see the light sort of hanging in the air for half a second if you're walking backwards while firing. But they are going away.

[amber atlas]

im getting some briggghttt streets

going to double check some other settings real quick

ah

anti light culling was on

i was doing some tests in a hallway like a week ago

mf'er

really flattens out the captured lighting, is the workflow to set it to one, recapture and then boost light intensity for every light in the level? that's definitely one way to do it...

[neat spindle]

I mean we're already relighting the scenes from scratch, so whatever's in our captures shouldn't really matter

[amber atlas]

well if you load a capture it doesn't update values from in the game right?

so which takes precedence?

is the value you set it to in the tool scaled by the value in remix?

so wouldn't you want to recapture to get the values they were scaled to, otherwise youd set it to 1, but it would be scaled down by that amount? or is just a straight cap?

[neat spindle]

Overrides should be applied after light translation, so whatever you do in the toolkit won't be changed by messing around with scaling values.

[amber atlas]

im definitely not grasping

so highest primacy is remix tool

or rather overrides from remix tool

[amber atlas]

ok just confirmed it

one of my lights has an override on it and when you scale those values they flicker like crazy but then set back to override

[neat spindle]

Yeah, that's why there's the warning about setting direct values rather than dragging the slider

[amber atlas]

makes sense

i dont want to jinx it but the anti light culling might have been making it crash, that's probably just wishful thinking on my part though

[neat spindle]

So we can have the Light Translation settings at whatever we want while working on the project, it shouldn't matter. We just need to have some settings for the final release to handle dynamic lights that get spawned.

[amber atlas]

too bad their default values were all at 5...

[neat spindle]

It took a little trial and error but I was able to find the right scale for lights at radius 1.

Now I'm trying to figure out where the hell I got the radius 1 thing from, it's been so long since I did all the lighting

... Well fuck, I guess I just misread this at some point and did all my lighting wrong.

[amber atlas]

oh shiii

radiance vs radius?

[neat spindle]

Yeah, lmao

I bet I was reading this at like 5 in the morning

[amber atlas]

i mean whatever happened, it definitely clued us into a pretty probable approach to fixing the muzzleflashes

so i guess it all worked out?

[neat spindle]

🥺

Alright, well at least we can use the intensity cap setting on the muzzle flashes and feeding light

[amber atlas]

yeah i'll keep stress testing it, but honestly it seems like it's going to work, outside of the volumetrics staying for just a bit, which may be a request we can make, like... kill volumetrics with lights when supress light keeping is on?

unless theres some technical reason they can't do that or won't

[neat spindle]

Messed around with the intensity cap a bit and I think 2500 is a value that's about right for both the muzzle flashes and feeding spotlight.

[amber atlas]

That's roughly where I was landing as well, I think I had around 3000 and it was feeling fairly good. I'm wary of it capping lights that looked good in the level though. It did dim the street lights slightly and it kind of flatened out the hub lighting a little which gave me some pause D:

[amber atlas]

put in a couple feature requests for texture tagging that might help both vtmb and other users out

1. A tag for using the alpha map of the albedo as the emissive mask and just setting emissive default 1 (overidden in tool later just like the light intensity stuff
   2)A new tag for just ignoring baked light maps but keeping the vertex colors or splitting the ignore baked lighting into 2 tags for better particle support since vertex color is used to tint the final color

[left grove]

those are both good ideas

I am back, what did I miss?

[amber atlas]

just some experiements that Freedom's Flame, JBL and I were trying with lights, some interesting results, might be a path forward to mitigating the muzzleflash craziness!

[left grove]

nice nice

that's great, I was looking up and reading now

[neat spindle]

Remember that we'll be replacing all of those lights, the intensity cap only applies to translated lights.

Also did a run through the abandoned hospital and I think I've got some ideas on how to light it using "real" lights instead of the big fake area lights they have. I noticed there are a lot of those Exit signs placed throughout the map so we could slap an emissive on them combined with a primitive to do the bulk of the lighting.

Kinda like this (from some urbex I did a while back)

[left grove]

oh that's a good refence

I just wonder what lighting we should have for the abandoned one, probably some dim, mostly from the outside kind of stuff

the normal hospital may be easy, the ground floor/floor 1 can be normally lit, with the hospital white lights but I believe upstairs and downstairs it'll be darker

[neat spindle]

Most of the rooms in the abandoned hospital don't have windows to the outside because they're underground, unfortunately.

[left grove]

oh yes... that's going to be a fun one to figure out

it'd be like how our eyes eventually get used to darkness, so we'd need some ambient light or so

[neat spindle]

Yeah, that's where the challenge is, haha. I'm trying to find a way to do it without fake ambient light. There are also some spotlights hanging around from the film crew that can be used to light the area.

[left grove]

oh yes, those will mostly be it

I am trying to think what else we can use in there

[amber atlas]

Yeah, I'm just thinking about sort of the macro to micro buckets of work, and in this case we end up creating a TON of micro work for ourselves, it went from being pretty close and just needing to tweak areas to.... needing to touch every light in the game.

Which I think probably would have happened over time anyway? But it puts a lot of primacy on a large swath of work that goes into the micro bucket at least in my internal mental organization 😄

[neat spindle]

That's fair. I guess I just always assumed we were going to be replacing every single light in the game since what looks good with fake lighting techniques and what looks good with physically-based lighting are different. But yeah, it is a lot of micro-level tedium.

[amber atlas]

I think in the long run it will probably be necessary? So it's probably fine 😄

[dawn ivy]

I needed a break from that damn loading bay and door that I do have working in game but not entirely happy with yet again.....so I tackled the rusty car for a change, definitely good for modeling practice, Just a start so dont judge that bumper I just slapped on. I don't think this appears anywhere other than a rusted out hull but I figure a little extra detail on the model will make it easier to texture.

[dawn ivy]

Latest dxvk and bridge working fine for me as well btw

[amber atlas]

nice!

First pass on the plaster walls. I need to brighten them up quite a bit...

Overbrightened to show off, first pass on wall damage, using the POM shader to get some nice results

lots more to do

oh!

also some tests on the medicince cabinet texture

unfortunately its not a model so i cant just remake it entirely D:

[grave flower]

Ive heard in hl2 rtx they made the brushes into models to replace them

[feral siren]

It's shaping up quite nicely. Hope you will post more side by side pics.

[tame shard]

this is true, we use a tool called Propper and then we replace the mesh. not certain tho if there's a brand of propper that works with VTMB's version of Source

I guess an option is to model a very low poly model in engine as a replacement mesh and edit the actual level to do it if Propper doesn't work, but you're then introducing incompatibility if the Unofficial Patch makes level changes to the Santa Monica Haven in future (or with other mods, anyway)

on HL2RTX we can be the source of truth for an HL2 + RTX thing, including our own game code and stuff, but any VTMB mod has to consider compatibility with the unofficial patch, so it's a bit fiddly

[tame shard]

sometimes brushwork is stable (not very often, though) on its own. have you checked the mesh's stability ingame with the debug view?

[amber atlas]

@tame shard 's articulation is absolutely the shape of the problem!

I haven't checked stability on this one, but it appears in multiple places in this level, and multiple places in other levels too, so it's definitely a more finicky situation. I tried an early test with replacing the door brushes with a door model, and it was stable for certain sides of the brush. So one side of the door was my new mesh, but go to the other side and suddenly it was the old door. Was incosistent across all doors in the level, so I'd have to go delete all brush faces and replace potentially one with the mesh? But when they moved, sometimes they'd turn into the old door.

Probably more specific to dynamic props of course

Unfortunately not very stable D:

oddly enough the doors are the only stable geo hash in the place XD wtf

[tame shard]

the really dubious option here is to check if it cycles through a limited number of hashes and replace all of them, but I don't know how fun that'll be lol

[amber atlas]

Hey, I still owe you a bunch of assets for HL2, I don't have time for that!

[amber atlas]

Did you guys see the new commits?!

Sky reproduction fixes and outward parallax occlusion mapping!

Ahhhhhh!

I'm at the airport right now flying to ANOTHER funeral unfortunately. But I'll pull those and test them on Saturday when I'm back.

[neat spindle]

Oh shit, the sky fix finally made it into the main branch?

[amber atlas]

I think? I haven't checked, I'll pull Saturday. If you check earlier than that please let us know!

[dawn ivy]

Yeah I have been busy lately but super excited for the outward PoM. That stupid loading bay I was working on looked really good when offset back so that the panels were pushed outward but it screwed up the alignment so with this update they should look like that without screwing things up.

[amber atlas]

Yeah that texture is a perfect candidate for benefiting from outward pom

[amber atlas]

Confirmed the sky models no longer flicker or drag behind camera movements.

[amber atlas]

Also confirming outward displacement, it's a bit of a different way to interact with it than I'm used to, but I'm getting some nice results from it!

if you give equal values to inner and outter displacement it kind of gives the same effect as having a gray midpoint, and it gives you some variable control to adjust your results which is nice

getting the little door numbers to stick out properly now is pretty satisfying

holds up pretty perfectly under motion

thanks for tackling that @spice hemlock it's a massively needed addition

very excited to go in and fix up some stuff to make things pop even more

[bleak barn]

That door looks so good

[feral siren]

Hope you can share more screenshots of it.

[feral siren]

It really does look good and doesn't have that weird displacement artifact.

[neat spindle]

I'll have to mess around with this and see how it looks on my wainscoting.

[amber atlas]

I did notice if the value is too high and you go at too shallow of an angle you can see it repeat. That was true before too though.
I also tried setting it to clamp instead of repeat and it just disappears, so I'm going to report that as a bug, since clamping would just outright solve that issue perfectly!

[amber atlas]

I was going to try it on the hallway wainscotting as well, though I will need to modify my hi poly a bit to get it to be more neutral

[amber atlas]

Did find some issues with the 3d skybox projection fixes:
Some meshes don't properly render in the right order, and their vertex colors bleed through even with vertex color strength set to 0

stuff like this wall will randomly render the other parts of the sky background through it

its technically in the skybox as well

in some areas this topper doesn't render correctly vertex color plus not in the right render order, move slightly and it goes back

sides of the toppers there having the same issue (pink and yellow/green)

[neat spindle]

Huh, wonder what's different between David's original implementation and what made it into the main branch, these are new issues.

[amber atlas]

same

david's original version still remains as the most perfect implementation (at least for vtmb)

it hasn't worked quite right otherwise

additionally in these later versions of dvkx and bridge the transparency issues with particles are even wackier, not sure what to suggest in terms of how to fix it for the core team :/

[neat spindle]

The dynamic thing he was trying to do was a bit wonky, but the static scale implementation was perfect

[amber atlas]

i think the dynamic thing worked for messiah almost perfectly

this implementation is REALLY close

but there is still some render order issues etc

also in these latest versions, stuff like the cloud circle that wraps around the skybox just DOENST work right anymore

but it looked perfect before

[neat spindle]

It worked in VTMB too at the end, but the adjustment period was super user-unfriendly. Every time you enter a new level it would have to jitter around for a bit until it settled.

[neat spindle]

Interesting. I never did find a texture flag that worked well for the cloud ring, but I think that had more to do with the alpha masking issues that all the original textures have than anything.

[amber atlas]

yeah wasn't even necessary for us either since vtmb team stayed consistent with 16x

many versions ago if you just set it to sky it would blend perfectly

at least with the older versions of dvkx and bridge + david's sky

now it makes a dark blurry ring aroudn the level that makes odd motion blur like flickering

most of the particles do some really odd blurry flickering on things behind them

[neat spindle]

That's been there for a while, then, because that's the texture issue I've been having I think. Must not have messed with it before.

[amber atlas]

yeah its been there for a few versions

i had stayed a version or two in the past and then i upgraded and started seeing that

not sure what or how to report that

"particles look... weird!"

[neat spindle]

Or actually maybe not, I think what I remember is that when I flagged the ring as sky it would just disappear rather than blending.

[amber atlas]

probably going to get footage and take my best guess at a bug report haha

alpha blending in general has seemed to get rougher since that update

[feral siren]

@amber atlas Did you remove David's fixes when you tried the new dvkx & bridge?

[amber atlas]

they are contained in files that got overwritten by the new dvkx and bridge, so yes they should be gone
they are contained in the dlls

[feral siren]

Oh so likely the latest version of dvkx and bridge has issues with its implementation. It has nothing to do with conflicts between 2 fixes.

[amber atlas]

I think that's what's going on, yes.

[amber atlas]

@spice hemlock Sorry for the tag, I had a few questions.

Now that the alpha has been out in the wild for a bit, I've got a few users who have tried the bloodlines remaster alpha in a few contexts and it's holding up super well!

I have users who are running it through steam AND GOG.com and on 2080's up to 4080's and all are reporting that it's working for the most part!
And running pretty well if set at an appropriate resolution!

I do have a user here and there that are reporting issues and I have dmp files from them and I'm seeing at least once access violation.
An example would be something like this when launching NVRemixBridge:
ERROR_CODE: (NTSTATUS) 0xc0000005 - The instruction at 0x%p referenced memory at 0x%p. The memory could not be %s.
FAILURE_ID_HASH: {f7938165-b4af-ccbf-11b4-f442616c9ba8}

This particular user is trying to use a 2070, is it just that they simply don't have the VRAM to even use Remix?

Without going too deep, is there a good place to see things like error codes and access violations, and is there a document about compatible (not recommended) hardware and OS info?

I'd like to be able to do the leg work on hunting down stuff like this before bothering any of you from NV.

Also, this will help me dial in min specs and I can add better info to the mod in general to give guidance to people who might download it etc.

Any advice?
Thanks in advance!

[spice hemlock]

This particular user is trying to use a 2070, is it just that they simply don't have the VRAM to even use Remix?

AFAIK vram running out normally manifests as a DEVICE_LOST error in the dxvk logs, not an access violation

document about compatible (not recommended) hardware and OS info?
I think there's something along these lines for Portal RTX, but it's more about recommended quality settings. I don't think we have the QA bandwidth to have hardware / OS recommendations at that level

If you have .dmp files from them, you should be able to open that up in a debugger and see exactly what lines are erroring.

(presuming you've gone through the process of being able to build locally, and still have the symbol files from the build you distributed with your mod)

[amber atlas]

Haha yeahhhh... I figured on the QA issue, we are literally going through the same thing with our software at the day job.

Thanks for the insight, that gives me some stuff to follow up on!

[sinful lily]

Will the new remix release mean the support of TVs in the game? I thought I saw notes about render target support.

[left grove]

oh? that's already working, take a look at it here

[spice hemlock]

by default, things like TVs will just use the raster pipeline. You can mark the TV's render target as a raytraced render target (using the texture categorization menu), and that will make the contents of the screen ray traced instead of rastered.

Not actually sure how that will interact with the news banner and stuff on that TV though... the content I tested it with didn't have anything like that. It might work if you mark those as world space UI or something, but it may also need more feature work from Remix to support properly

[left grove]

Ah I see. Thanks!

In this case it was just another camera to some hidden room with all the character and the other elements for the news banner just floats in mid air

[spice hemlock]

then that will probably work fine.

just a matter of picking the right render target in the remix menus

[left grove]

Neat, will try it out soon

[amber atlas]

The current alpha release does in fact have those render targets marked correctly so they should be showing their ray traced versions.

So you should actually already be seeing it correctly @left grove

there are a few throughout the game I haven't found and tagged yet but I've gotten a good bit of them.

One area this doesn't work so far is the little windows for rendering the items in the inventory as well as the initial character select screen, I think it's done through a slightly different method, still looking into HOW but that's a limitation right now that's not supported by the current RTT implementation 😦 shows the old raster version

[left grove]

oh neat

[left grove]

I am sure if we open a ticket for it we may be able to get that implemented

[amber atlas]

Yeah I want to, but I'm trying to figure out more about what it's actually doing first, so I'm not just like... "go look at it and figure it out for me" in the ticket lol XD

[left grove]

yeah very sensible

[amber atlas]

OH

also

ive been doing some more tests

[left grove]

those are looking fantastic, absolutely stunning

[amber atlas]

thanks! def some more tweaks i want to make to most of them but i think they are on the right track

wish we had a fake interior shader like spiderman, would be cool to inset some of the stuff inside the window beyond the glass but keep the glass surface on the front + reflectivity

i made one in unity once, but that was with shader graph... i can't hand write shaders very well haha

[snow osprey]

It turned out very beautifully, I can't even believe my eyes that a remaster of this level is possible 😇

[stray whale]

the lamppost base should be thinned a bit in it's current state it's a hanging a bit off the ground looking off

[amber atlas]

Already on my known issues list. The OG level designers didn't measure their placement, so some places it works fine, and other areas it hangs off. Shouldn't be terribly hard to modify.

[worthy bobcat]

hi guys ^^

any news?

[amber atlas]

Hey sorry! Had to go to a 4th funeral. Hopefully the last one in a while. Also Holidays. I've actually got the diner mostly done!

Only a few props and one like 2 textures left.

I've also been separating out everying into layers. Going to have to do that on the stuff I've already done 😦
But the long term plan is to offer 2 downloads, one with just the emissive fixes + some material tweaks and lighting and texture tagging (small file size hopefully)

And the other being the full replacement download (super large file size)

I'm actually seperating things into more layers than that so I have flexibility down the line to slit the downloads up more if need be, like all weapons in one, all characters (if skeletal retargeting ever ends up getting addressed) etc.

Here's a couple shots to tide you over ;3

[tame shard]

this is superb mate, well done 👍

[worthy bobcat]

❤️ NICE MAN ^^ its realy nice job on this

[balmy sandal]

Oh man, would love to see it in the level

[gloomy maple]

model every single pepperflake

fantastic models

❤️

[amber atlas]

haha thanks, i am going to actually lower the level of how filled it is so it's more obvious that it's not a texture on the outside, but a volume on the inside!

[amber atlas]

Appreciate it :3

[worthy bobcat]

^^ some new ? ^^ sorry but we really love u job on this

[feral siren]

I think there are some new showcase in moddb but yeah would really love some new screenshots even wip or just in-editor models.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/vampire-the-masquerade-bloodlines-rtx-remaster/news/the-diner

[amber atlas]

I've been posting a lot to my Twitter and to the moddb screenshots section but didn't want to flood this area, but I'll post them here too!

Here are some wider comparison shots of the diner

I'm still trying to work out the curtain shading, it looks fine in toolbag, but I haven't quite dialed it in for remix's renderer...

Finished up all the kitchen utensil stuff that appears in the diner

the giovanni mansion and one or two other levels use a few extra pots and pans that are variants of these, so it should be easy to do those

have been wanting to do the gumball machine for a while

i found out it's an eagle dual head candy machine

so i was able to get some good ref

still a bit to do, but closing in on the high poly for the machine

the gumballs are going to be fun lol

VonAether actually has recreated a lot of the labels in VTM:B and has generously offered to let me use them, so I will probably be updating the coffee machine and cans with those better labels before too long

My trello task tracking for the diner puts me now around:
54% done on diner props
65% done on diner environmental materials

i think i'm going to do an audit of every new area i start on because there was way more to do in this tiny map than i first thought, and keeping track of it in memory is a dumb way to do it

Oh and lastly some IMG Sli's:
https://imgsli.com/MzQ3MDg1/0/1
https://imgsli.com/MzQ3MDg1/2/3
https://imgsli.com/MzQ3MDg1/4/5
https://imgsli.com/MzQ3MDg1/6/7

ignore the thumbnails 😦 use the links!

[feral siren]

Thank you for sharing these wonderful artworks of yours. I may not be good at giving words but I really do appreciate your work.

[carmine fern]

https://tenor.com/view/oh-my-god-wow-snap-damn-amazing-gif-12917328

[shadow moth]

I wanna buy this game now

[broken scaffold]

RELEASE THE PIZZA CUT GOD DAMN IT

[amber atlas]

AHHHHH! Yes, sir, I'll get right on it sir!

[broken scaffold]

https://tenor.com/view/eric-andre-pizza-ball-gif-7289601

[amber atlas]

lfgooooo pizzaballll

[worthy bobcat]

the principe is proud of u ❤️ its PERFECT

[amber atlas]

Gumball machines done. Pink color isn't quite right... Tried to get the colors lined up on the front the same way they were in the OG. Went with an in universe lore food company for the branding.

[shadow moth]

Peak

[amber atlas]

I forgot to post this here!

The cup logos and individual drink labels on the soda fountain are actually generously created and provided by VonAether, a long time Bloodlines community member and modder in the space!

I did the cup first, then did a fluid sim and posed the cup and used VonAether's images for the background.

It definitely needs a second pass, but It was a fun first try at it.

[shadow moth]

Any plans to put it on Steam?

[amber atlas]

I definitely want to look into that. A couple things I'm not sure about:

1. Can I keep compatibility with UP, or does steam need mods to work independently out of box

2. If I can't, is there a way I can make it encapsulated on it's own but still let people install UP

3. What are the requirements on steam for mods in general

4. What's the best way to split the content up, as the mod is going to become HUGE as I go due to texture sizes, so is there a way to partition it (I can definitely do this on Moddb)

So I have a bunch of stuff to look into on that front.

But it's going to be a while before it's near a point where I'd feel comfortable trying to put it on steam anyway so I should have plenty of time to look into this

[amber atlas]

ShopLight and CeilingE done as well!

didn't put rust on the glass... might put some grime instead?

[feral siren]

I think it's already good. I rarely see that kind of dirt in that type of light.

[gloomy maple]

maybe some yellowing

well

idk

looks good anyways

[amber atlas]

I definitely could try yellowing the bulbs a bit, but I'd want to go easy so it doesn't mismatch the light color too too much, I'll give it some tests later on!

Took some liberties with the mop. Wanted to get more detail of some kind, since the original was a bit rough.

[burnt basalt]

so like, how playable is this RTX remix mod?

[carmine fern]

very playable

[agile quiver]

Why nvidia pushing half-life2, when this definitely better in every way. Hope they will notice this absolute gorgeous work and allot team for the help.

[somber sundial]

@amber atlasYou're really kicking ass here ❤️

You're hitting a very tasteful balance of keeping to the source material whilst updating for the new possible fidelity

[strange topaz]

I guess they did notice it? It was featured in the recent trailer for RTX remix

[amber atlas]

Hehehe I actually work on the HL2 project as well! I've done some art for them. That team is filled with INSANELY talented people. I do think the team overall is definitely trying to do a couple things to differentiate it from all the other up res mods out there and sort of lean into the tech a bit. I can't say too much because I've signed an NDA but I will say that the leadership there is incredible and that they talk about exactly this subject pretty much every day, and are very keen on hitting the right target, so stay tuned on the HL2 project as well I think it's great!

But also thanks for your kind words too :3

[amber atlas]

Thanks so much! I really am trying to figure out how far to push it, and what's too far. There are definitely a few assets I've changed and plan to change, but I definitely want to have it FEEL just like Bloodlines.

[amber atlas]

Hehehe but they didn't notice they used the Bloodlines 2 logo on accident!
I didn't know they were going to feature my work in that trailer so it was a really nice surprise!

[amber atlas]

0.0.1 Alpha is out on the moddb.

Things to note:

Particle FX and Water and Fullscreen FX like protean are pretty broken right now!
That's something I'm looking into.

I talked with the original lead programmer of Bloodlines and he confirmed my suspicion that particles are tagged in a special way that automatically sorts them all onto multiple sheets of sprites, which makes it IMPOSSIBLE for Remix to get stable hashes on them, so my theory is that I can try and basically define them not as particle textures and see if they don't get sorted.

The water is a bit trickier, I actually know of a solution, but I wanted to raise it as a feature on Remix's side first because I think it's a common use case.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/vampire-the-masquerade-bloodlines-rtx-remaster/downloads/vampire-the-masquerade-bloodlines-rtx-remaster-001/
Here's the download page if you do want to check it out. VERY BUGGY!

I have been out of town 12 hours ahead on the other side of the world so I haven't gotten to make progress on this, but I got back last night, and I'm going to be trying to get the final portion of the diner done and do another alpha release soon!

Also now that 1.0 of remix is out I'm going to be checking out a few of the new features from it and hopefully integrating them into the next alpha, but we'll see!

[gloomy maple]

prolly one of the best remix mods rn

i feel like remix was built for source lol

[agile quiver]

so, tell them to set light sources intensity to OG level.

[amber atlas]

I agree, I think Source being already very nice looking, but many of the projects shooting for photorealism definitely sets them up to succeed with physically based rendering and more modern lighting. There are definitely some games that are more hurt by trying to make it a modern graphics pipleine project, like very stylized games etc. Very easy to go overboard though, so I'll try and keep finding the balance!

[shadow moth]

Now I have a reason to buy the game

[broken scaffold]

Safemilk's assets are unbelievable

I haven't followed the HL2RTX twitter closely but what props should I be looking out for

where'd the milk spill

[amber atlas]

Haha thanks, man! That means a lot!

The assets I've remastered so far are lots of pipes, sinks, and toilets etc.
So I don't think a lot of them are going to be in the demo just yet!

Toilets and sinks and a heater bracket in the prison rooms in Nova Prospekt and the big bathroom areas.
I've also done some stuff that appears in Ravenholm near the end, and some some various things around City 17.

I would love to be doing weapons and characters for them, but their weapons and character teams are just... amazing, they put me to shame!

So I think most of my stuff is not going to show up until more releases.
I'll def point them out when we release playable stuff that includes my work!

[broken scaffold]

Alright, but I'm still waiting for some delicious RTX pizza

[amber atlas]

I think I'm just going to order a pizza and try to bite it in the same way it's bitten in the game now, then scan it ;3

[cerulean wagon]

You present the situation in a very disingenuous way. Nvidia isn't pushing anything, they are promoting it because first of all it's Half Life 2, an extremely popular and iconic game, Bloodlines is barely known by anyone and much more niche, secondly the HL2 remix team is big and managed in a professional way although it's volunteer work. They got Nvidia's attention when they saw how serious they were about it.

[amber atlas]

Very true. I had no idea how niche Bloodlines was until I got deeper in this project. The difference in audience sizes is staggering! I feel very lucky I get to contribute to the HL2 project, learning a lot from the other artists there.

On the other hand I do hope I can prove to Nvidia this is a viable project that deserves a bit of feature support moving forward though! I definitely have some roadblocks I think they could help me with, but I have to show them it's worth their time as well haha!

[strange topaz]

VTMB walked so Cyberpunk could fly

[cerulean wagon]

I agree that Nvidia should try to help more, they can certainly afford it, I was just commenting on the disingenuous nature of that guy's post which was simultaneously putting down HL2 RTX team's work and making some baseless accusation of Nvidia "pushing" them or playing favorites, whatever he was trying to say

[amber atlas]

Haha yeah I certainly agree, it's not nearly as sinister... Most of what they added for HL2 into the Remix toolkit just came out in 1.0.0, so the HL2 team is basically beta testing for everyone else XD

But yeah, Remix team is such a tiny team, so it makes sense they'd be interested in the group that's pushing the hardest on proving their tech is viable. So I definitely agree with you, it's more of a natural choice of, where can we put our very limited team size/time to what will give the biggest impact so we can make Remix grow and prove it's efficacy so we can increase adoption! Or something along those lines XD

[tight yew]

Quite excited to give this a go when I can!

[tight yew]

Thanks for sharing this

[amber atlas]

Of course! Always nerve wracking to put out alphas, but I figured I had to do something for the 20th anniversary, and just pull the bandaid off and put it out there!

[sinful lily]

Curious to know if any of the 1.0 updates have helped improve the workflow for VTMB. Every update I keep searching the patch notes for something regarding fixing 3D skybox stuff.

[tight yew]

@amber atlas in terms of this project, what sort of scope are you looking at? Are you solely focusing on remixing a single area?

[neat spindle]

Damn, Safemilk, you've really been putting in work. Sorry for dropping off the face of the earth, life's been hectic lately.

Has David's skybox fix been merged into main yet or is it still in limbo?

[amber atlas]

Hey! No worries I've also been all over the place, had to travel for work and such!
David's skyox fix did merge in, but it still has the bug that wasn't in David's specific version of it where some faces still have vertex coloring and don't sort correctly in terms of transparency.

In other news RTX Skin also has a problem that I've bug reported where it creates borders around edges that don't connect, in the case of Bloodlines, the default characters are split randomly between hardware and software rendering, at those borders, the skin creates seams!

Additionally, Remix still captures non full skeletal bone chains, so it only captures 2 bones, root, joint 1

And it will do this multiple times for every skeleton, so it's spitting out 40 skeletons per character that are only 2 joints long, meaning remapping characters won't work currently :/
Going to put some resources together to put a bug report in for that as well!

Also I hit 100% texture/material replacement in SM_Diner_1 last night, now I'm just doing the remaining diner props, then I'll do another release. Though the remaining diner props are going to take a little bit!

[neat spindle]

That's amazing, nice work! You're definitely the prop master here, haha. Here's hoping the skeleton issues get sorted out, I know you've been really jonesing to replace character models

[amber atlas]

Haha yeah, I have a few character tests pretty far along, I usually anchor them to physics objects so I can take them around and look at them in different lighting conditions, but they are all just T-Posing XD

[broken scaffold]

That's it

I'm fixing the skinning tonight

Mark my words

Any solution to get your busty vampire babe in the game is the way it's gotta be

[amber atlas]

HAHA that's why you're the KING @broken scaffold

[neat spindle]

Watch the female character models break because they have physically simulated "objects" lol

[left grove]

oh good to see some activity here. My life has been taken over by Kingdom come deliverance 2

[shadow moth]

You’ve convinced me, I’m buying the game!

[left grove]

do you even the Remix stuff with an RX 7600?

well remember to get the unofficial patch

if bought on steam -> download and install unofficial patch
if bought on gog -> comes with unofficial patch by default

[shadow moth]

[left grove]

asking for a friend ofcourse

[shadow moth]

I’ve ran Remix on a Steam Deck

[left grove]

I can't say I have tried

and HL2 RTX causes my system to have a kernel power critical error

[shadow moth]

HL2 RTX was something different on its own…

That game brought my GPU to 20fps at 720p upscaled from 256p

[left grove]

oh I am aware, I think my PBO settings are unstable somehow but nothing else causes it so whatever. I am on a 7800X3D with a 4080, you'd think it'd be fine

and tbf I noticed even VTMB Remix got a bit funky moving from a 5950X to a 7800X3D, but other people seem fine on X3D

[amber atlas]

Was wondering where you've been 😉

[left grove]

in Bohemia

[river summit]

What % of the game is complete ?

Also, can this run on a 3090 ?

1080p

[left grove]

I believe you can run it on a 3090 since Safemilk has a 3080 (I believe). At 1080p you should be good, but will require some DLSS

well in terms of %, if there are 70 maps (with shared assets of course), safemilk has basically worked on 2-3 so far. Meaning it'd be around 2.86% - 4.29% complete when you think about it on a per map basis

Assets are shared between levels so he won't have to redo the same thing over and over, but each map will contain new assets and textures. So total assets done % will probably be much higher

[river summit]

Can I contribute to the project ?

I know how to use blender and can make 3d assets, maybe textures

[neat spindle]

Of course, we have a GitHub repo in the pins if you want to get project files set up and start messing around with it yourself

[amber atlas]

I also do sneaky little things that interest me as I go... was just doing some Mausoleum in HW_Cemetery_1 today because I'm tired of looking at SM_Diner_1
I always do a few things for SM_Hub_1/2 as I go as well, and whenever I do assets they also show up in many different locations, so I think the percentage is slightly higher, but only be like... 0.005 lol

[left grove]

oh don't worry I was just giving an estimate based on % since the question was the complete %, I did my best guess

[left grove]

Damn

[left grove]

that's so good holy shit

[amber atlas]

really want to hit the ceiling and the stained glass window

got some great reference from poking around and VonAether helping me find some stuff

its actually a cemetery in hollywood for real

these days they simplified it and took out the cool ceiling though :/

[amber atlas]

thanks :3

[neat spindle]

The stained glass has been my big hangup on Confession, my modeling skills are nowhere near up to scratch for something like that

[amber atlas]

i was looking at those windows the other day, my gosh they are complicated

very very cool tho

[snow osprey]

The window with mosaic and the rays of light that shine from the window are simply divine. 🥰

[amber atlas]

im excited to redo those proper!

i found out a cool way to do light projection to textures in blender

so i was going to redo the window then use that to get a nicer detailed projection for it!

[left grove]

so this is digital archeology, preserving the old cemetery

[neat spindle]

Yeah, back before I got too busy I was trying to learn some architectural modeling stuff, but Jesus, Gothic architecture is so complex, haha

Like even for something "simple" like the frames for the windows I'm having to learn a bunch of geometric ratios and shit

[amber atlas]

haha yeah oh i just ran into that with the diner too

still some passes i want to do

not sure how i feel about the changes to the curtain i made honestly

but yeah there's so much filligree and fanciness in everything

[left grove]

yeah seems overly changed what about a more basic transparent sheet

seems almost like a bug net in the old one

[amber atlas]

i wanted to reveal the complexity of the stuff behind it, but i dont think it's working

so i'll probably redo it and make it much more like the OG

[left grove]

it's a good shout, they obviously did that in the original

[amber atlas]

i love when the door frames and window frames are models because then i can go crazy and actually model out the details

sm_diner has more surprise props in it than i realized so every time i think im getting close its like

oh did you know theres a cabinet handle thats microscopic!??!

OH BOY

luckily quite a bit of those things show up elsewhere

cabinet handles and door handles show up all over

VonAether is a WIZARD and has been able to find or reproduce a ton of logos and packaging, so when I do the procucts I'll be able to use their logos

[left grove]

yeah I guess we won't truly understand the props and their complexities

[snow osprey]

Oh those cute curtains from the 90s 😍

[amber atlas]

I had done them this way so I could show the windows and doors, since they had cool details

but I dont knowwwww they are feeling funky XD

[neat spindle]

Do they have proper subsurface scattering enabled? They look a little too... opaque?

[left grove]

actually, it does fit in this case, but still feels a little too over done

damn context really matters heh

[amber atlas]

the big issue is that the transparency accumulates over time with them, and they go from being opaque to like, completely see through

[neat spindle]

Lol, what? That sounds like a bug, haha

[left grove]

I think you nailed the transparency

it's just the shape

[amber atlas]

Most of Remix renders over time, since things are mostly temporal

so if you sit on one frame long enough it will look different than when you first rested on it

same with sharpness and roughness

[left grove]

and it's kinda weird the window has the curtains baked in as well, like on the outside

[amber atlas]

haha yeah, thats the old texture for the outside curtain as well, its got like... 2 sets?

its odd

and outside its like, the reverse?

i would have also thought, yellow on outside, blue on inside to be honest

yellow from the diner lights, and blue from the hazy outside light?

but blue on the outside makes it striking and noticeable

[left grove]

oh that makes sense

[neat spindle]

Does the diner interior have the street modeled at all or is it just empty outside so you can't turn the window into a real window?

[amber atlas]

empty outside

[neat spindle]

Yeah, figured as much

[amber atlas]

Omri Koresh was asking me about that too, hoping that remix could add it, but that would be a hammer editor change

[snow osprey]

I wonder if the game has a built-in set of tools?

[amber atlas]

Had some fun with Bertram's hideout

It does, but its reverse engineered by Wesp and Community so it has some limitations, also, if I change the maps, I'm no longer compatible with Wesps Unofficial Patch, Plus or Normal, since that mod makes map changes

[neat spindle]

Could be something we could add with the unofficial tools, but that's for a much later stage of development. I know we were talking a bit about making an accompanying Hammer-level mod to add touches like that

[snow osprey]

Some locations look empty and They need to add some decorations and props. 🤷🏻‍♂️ But this is not a priority and I do not insist on this opinion in any way.

[amber atlas]

Yeah I think long term, beyond remastering what's there, I'd love to look into level enhancements, but that puts it right back into being incompatible with UP, same issue that Clan Quest has, it had to ship with a version of UP to make it work, but it's no behind the current version and it would be work for Burgermeister to update, so I'm trying to see how long I can stay compatible 😄

[neat spindle]

As long as the changes we do are subtle we could maybe get them rolled into Plus Patch, since it's not new game content like CQM

[amber atlas]

Well in the end that's all up to Wesp, he's got a vision for what he's trying to do, though I have seen him incorporate other people's stuff in when it make sense!

[neat spindle]

Of course, yeah, I just know he's incorporated other people's stuff in the past

[amber atlas]

want to hear some DEVASTATING news?

that right side of this cabinet

is carpet

not noticeable now

VERY noticeable after i remaster it D:

[neat spindle]

Is it level geometry? You might be able to add a replacement plane for just that part with your cabinet wood material

[amber atlas]

its unfortunately brushwork, so it will need a stable hash to get replaced, maybe the hotdog machine? that doesn't show up anywhere else i dont think?

though if the hot dog machine gets culled (which i think it does quite frequently) there will be many angles that it would disappear

[shadow moth]

Steam release when

[amber atlas]

Definitely something I'm looking into!

[neat spindle]

Made a pretty new bartop texture, was fun to play around with the geometric shapes

[amber atlas]

very nice

you do this in the node editor?!

[neat spindle]

Yep! Here's where the magic happens

[amber atlas]

nice, well done

i have that somewhat done, but i modeled out the pieces XD

[neat spindle]

Hey, if it works, haha

This gets used in all the bars, too, so Asylum and The Last Round are all taken care of too with this

Now that I've got my base workflow for wood boards figured out it's pretty easy to just copy-paste that foundation and use it in all kinds of things.

[amber atlas]

nice!

[neat spindle]

Been enjoying working on the wood textures, here's some water-damaged boards

[amber atlas]

that looks great

but

i hate to say it

thats not wood in the og

does look noice though

[neat spindle]

It looks like really weathered wood to me, with lots of cracks. You can see the grain

[amber atlas]

mat_crosshair

stone/confwllg

supposed to be a type of marble

[neat spindle]

Bizarre. It's definitely wood in the texture though, haha

[amber atlas]

just looks like marble slabs but with the contrast turned up

i went to mexico and snuck into a church and found really similar looking marble stones they were doing something super similar, but with the floor

obviously not blown out contrast

[neat spindle]

Weird, alright. I'm trying to find some reference images that look even close to the original texture

[amber atlas]

yeah i mean if you want to go with the wood, that's definitely a choice you can go with too, if you feel i'ts more of the vibe you like, i think you did a great job with it as is

i think a lot of people would probably read that as wood too and totally vibe with the remaster you did of it

[neat spindle]

In my mind I went to water-damaged wood because of the streaks around the edge of the ceiling. Imagined the construction as stone walls with a wood/tile roof that fell into disrepair at some point, which is where the streaks on the interior came from. Wouldn't hurt to experiment with marble, though, I'm just trying to find something to reference

[amber atlas]

I defintely see why you got there, it totally makes sense. I think it's ambiguous enough that it could go either way. A couple of those tiles having more of the veins than the grain is what originally made me suspicious and use mat_crosshair haha

i think if you lower contrast and increase brightness it definitely is more reminiscent of the tiles i saw in mexico

but i think the bloodlines ones are definitely thicker, slabbier, and have a mixture of marble patterns

not just the veiny marble

they are also missing my checkered van

;3

[neat spindle]

I can definitely see what you're saying with the cranked contrast, which killed all the detail in the dark seams

[amber atlas]

i noticed lots of textures like that throughout the game where they just did some really crazy photoshop sliders on things and made the texture look totally weird, but it works in the old source engine pretty well

[neat spindle]

Gotta make it look just different enough from whatever texture library CD they took the original scans from, haha

[amber atlas]

oh man, VonAether has been doing some investigative work on some of this and sending it my way

they found the ACTUAL PHOTO of the timer from google that troika used for the timer on the astrolite

like

its just a direct rip

wild stuff

[neat spindle]

This project is such a cool window into the past of how asset creation was done

[amber atlas]

it's wild to go back to because hl2 and vampire were two of the games i literally copied process on when i was coming up through school

so i was doing a lot of these techniques thinking, this is the pinnacle of game art making!

and now i look back and i was like

wtf we were really just getting by doing whatever we could

so nostalgic XD

[neat spindle]

Hey, if image textures work for what you're doing why not save yourself the work of generating it from scratch? It's not like those 720p monitors were going to show the faults

[amber atlas]

haha yeah i think the end result is still gorgeous

2004 was such a time

i think im more worried by... many objects being split into like 20 different textures and not on one atlas, sometimes just being a picture of a distant object haha

i remember i did a character that the front shirt was one texture, the back shirt was a totally different file, same for pants, same for face

unwrapping was like, a foreign concept to me 😄

[neat spindle]

TIL the Last Round originally had a different name

Was trying to figure out what the map name was so I could name my captures appropriately and couldn't find an "la_last_round" in the map list

Turns out it was originally called the Exhaust Pipe, which is a much worse name

[amber atlas]

haha yeah!

that eluded me for so long

i was like, man this map just simply doesn't exist in the map list wtf

[feral siren]

Everything looks great man. Every part of the map you touch has received so much love and attention to detail.

[unborn tusk]

i love this project

please post more updates in #showcase!

[amber atlas]

I'll see what i can do! I've got some stuff coming up for it!

[left grove]

If you need any help testing anything or any footage, I'll be around

[amber atlas]

Absolutely, I will def be calling on you again XD

Since the diner is taking longer than expected due to some complicated props, I'm sneaking in a good chunk of additional work that isn't taking me nearly as long to sort out, so it should be a Diner+ release!

[broken scaffold]

I think I got a good handle on the skeleton stuff

I should have this done end of week

I mostly need to stress test that I didn't fuck up any other prop types, and then do some optimization because there's a lot of fuck around code in there

[neat spindle]

Feel free to DM me any tests you need done like with the skybox thing

[broken scaffold]

I did see you were in communication with the Nvidia peeps @amber atlas, any insight other than yes the mesh is split up with local bones?

Or were you talking about a seperate toolkit issue

[broken scaffold]

Probably will, I need people to walk through the game and check for any rogue polys or odd behavior

Note that you guys should pin the model LODs so it doesn't transition based on distance if you haven't already

Otherwise this whole thing goes wrong

[amber atlas]

The issue there is that at capture time, it captures in 2 bone chains, root and joint1.

[broken scaffold]

Yeah

So it's all related

It won't capture more because it capturing the d3d weight info passing in

This will be solved once my vertex proxy mapper comes in

[amber atlas]

Gotcha

I did run into another odd case

Might be due to the same issue just surfacing in a different way

I was able to get a capture of the FPS arms holind the mac10 and remap the mac10 and it's bolt to the correct-ish joints, in remix it actually auto lines it up perfectly and looks as if the character is holding my new mac10

but

in engine, nothing appears at all

could be the result of the same issue just way down the line

but i am slightly supsicious that it's a separate issue that will surface once your solution comes in and we get a successful remap

just something to put on the radar @broken scaffold

[broken scaffold]

You probably changed to software mode so the hash is constantly changing

Or some version of that process is happening

This is also solved by my mapper because we'll be hopefully looking at a singular stable map

At least that fix is baked in since I had to do it for DM anyway

Fingers crossed

[amber atlas]

When I captured I had it capturing a stable hash, and only replaced that, but it's also possible it's reporting differently that it is under the hood

i'll def be crossing my fingers haha

[broken scaffold]

If remix is picking up a stable hash, but it isn't replacing in the engine side, that means that whatever remix picked up is not the same thing

At the very minimum

[amber atlas]

i have some assets lined up to test this as well so we can get some fully replaced stuff that can put it through it's paces

[amber atlas]

that's one of my concerns

ive noticed with bloodlines sometimes stuff comes in and its not... quite right?

very rarely

but it has happened

[broken scaffold]

If you're telling me you replaced the few model arms I wouldn't be surprised if there is a mesh for the view model arms at the origin for like

One of the transformations

So it's always stable because it literally doesn't move

And doesn't recalculate anything

[amber atlas]

in this case that effectively is the situation yeah, the guns/arms are seperate skeletal meshes but they are the same thing, so in this case i tried the mac10 itself, but it's setup exactly like the arms

so yeah pretty much the exact situation

[broken scaffold]

In Dark Messiah, for the inventory, they literally spawn all the entities and stow them at the origin. I HAVE seen entities picked up by remix because I removed the culling side that were otherwise just there because it has to be lmao

[amber atlas]

lol

In this case, the weapon remains stable, but the hands are not

[broken scaffold]

Given we're basically sisters I would imagine something similar is being done, since source supports two view model arms

[amber atlas]

the guns are skinned on the hardware, and the hands are skinned on the software

if r_nohw 1 and r_nowsw 1 are any indicator

[broken scaffold]

If the hash looks stable, capture it and change map, see if the hash is the same again

[amber atlas]

capping now

mesh instance id for the mac10 is stable across both captures

as you expected, the hands mesh id's are not stable

so it is doing what it says its doing technically haha

[left grove]

same here, I'll help any way I can david, any binaries you send over I'll test out for you

[amber atlas]

real rough block in, only an hour or two of work

but i want to see if i can get another example for testing by the end of the week to go along with the mac10

i also have some female hands ready to go, but they need another pass as well i think

Pose test on the mac10 will never happens since i wont be changing anims, but I thought it looked neat

Also:

Spent a couple days burning through the brushwork materials for HW_Redspot_1 just to supplement the upcoming release a bit. Won't include the props just yet, other than the ones shared by the diner.

[neat spindle]

Ha, was about to ask if you started working on it because of all the shared props with the diner

[amber atlas]

But I wanted to include a bit more in the release and environment textures can be pretty quick to bang out if I model them and use all the texture libraries etc.

Haha yeah, just getting the base pass in, mainly the soda machines, gum, lighters, cash register, and gum, candybars are shared

and the shop light

but red spot has a lot of unique props in it too

[neat spindle]

How does using texture libraries work rights-wise? I thought we had to make everything from scratch?

[left grove]

Oh that looks good

[amber atlas]

Texture libraries are included with texturing tools and supplemental packs as well. Rights granted are that you can't redistribute them as a product or as a pack of resources to use by other users as is, but are granted rights to use them in construction of assets for a project or product. From scratch was referring to not purchasing finished assets and using them as is from stores like turbo squid or unity asset store etc. material libraries are an industry standard practice. In a AAA world you have a materials team which is definitely a nice to have, but even large studios use material libraries. The main thing is that they need to be used in the creation of an asset or modified from their original form factor in some way.

Another example is sculpting alpha maps like the skin alphas I used to create the skin normal details. I can't redistribute those but I can use them as masks to create texture detail on an asset I create. Like the XYZ skin resources for zbrush.

[rare hill]

logo for use

[neat spindle]

Damn, I wish I'd known that earlier, I've been generating everything completely from scratch with base noise patterns and it takes forever

It's been good experience at least, definitely makes me appreciate all the details that go into texturing

[oak forge]

So what did you all settle on at the end of the day for stabilizing hashes? I'm trying to catch up to speed with the last half a year.

Are you redoing maps as props ala Portal RTX or is there now a better way to handle Source bsp's?

[amber atlas]

I mean you've done awesome work. I think that clarity there could have been better, I apologize for the confusion on that. I think at the time the context was mostly around the paintings and finding the original authors etc. so I see how that might have sounded more broad.

[amber atlas]

So in terms of hashes and stability:
Essentially brushes will never be stable as you know, static props are stable, skinned meshes are not for portions of the mesh and stable for other portions of the mesh this is due to portions of the mesh being skinned on the hardware, and portions being skinned on the software.

So my approach so far has been to remaster within those limits:
-Full remodel and textures/materials for props
-Material/texture remaster for BSP environment textures
-Get examples ready to test skinned meshes when KingDavid finishes his fix to the skeletal meshes

KingDavid's potential fix that is hopefully on the way will fix a few issues regarding skinning:
Remix is capturing only 2 bones at a time for skeletal meshes making remapping impossible
Addressing the split meshes and making them all render in the correct way to be able to replace/remap

The reason I've restricted myself to not remodling bsp portions as meshes is because my aim is to have it be compatible (for as long as possible) With Wesp's Unofficial patch since that is far an a way the most adopted way to successfully play the game for a large percentage of the player base.

[rare hill]

overlay for screenshots, just in case
1080p and 4K (click to see)

[oak forge]

I really appreciate this writeup. The game I was working on has way less hope given it has full body skeletal meshes put into baked anims without skeletons, but it's good to know no magic bullet is coming for viz nonsense.

[amber atlas]

Oof that's rough, sorry to hear that your project is hitting a dead end there. Are you still going to push forward on the parts you CAN do? Or are you thinking of shelving it for now?

[oak forge]

Well, I just came back after a half year hiatus. So I'm rusty. 😅 But I'm gonna try my best with just static prop enhancements and textures for now when I pick it back up.

[tight yew]

Pretty

[rare hill]

Mmhm, grazie

[bleak barn]

That looks amazing! But the OG gives me more abandoned vibe than the new one. I don't know if that's because the OG looks more rusted or if it's because low resolution gives more food for interpretation. But regardless it looks amazing 💙

[amber atlas]

Interesting! I do think I have less of the striping in the marble than the OG, that marbling also looks very grimy at a glance in the original textures, so maybe I can reintroduce some of that feel.

I had another idea that I'm not sure I want to commit to with regards to the flower holders, if I get that done I'll post it and get some thoughts from you and others on it XD

[amber atlas]

Where I got so far, couple small changes as always

I need to do the speed loader and the rounds

everything should be set up to fold out as well

tried to translate the chrome/blued metal plus the sort of anisotropic scraping on the metal to a PBR material, since they just kind of threw pictures with any lighting conditions together for the original

not really happy with the grip, trying to conver the weird smooshed colt symbol from irl to fit the celtic knot thing they did, I might just change it and make it more perfectly circular

lots more to do!

[neat spindle]

Looking good, I think you captured the blued steel pretty well

https://riaccdn.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/dev_cdn/59/3560.jpg

Could just shrink the knot down like the colt badge on this one. Since the new textures are much higher res it will still be legible

[shadow moth]

We would have loved you on the P2 team

[amber atlas]

Yeah! That's a variant I was looking at too, as maybe an alternate approach, I had it as a full on larger circle before so it was sort of combining both approaches which I kind of liked, I can try that again and see if that works, but it might make more sense to just go fully on this variant...

[amber atlas]

alrighty, speedloader and rounds

not really sure what was going on with the original to be honest

[neat spindle]

The spikes push boolet into gun 🧠

[shadow moth]

@midnight coral get the rope, I think we need to kidnap someone

[midnight coral]

i dont think a rope's gonna be enough

[shadow moth]

Your right, get the van

[left grove]

Hey don't poach the best artist we have on vampire RTX

[amber atlas]

lol I ain't got enough free time for anything but HL2 RTX and Vampire RTX XD

[shadow moth]

[tame shard]

hey, we poached him first! 😝

[shadow moth]

https://tenor.com/view/pika-pikachu-gif-24936011

We'll get em next time

[rare hill]

pls, don't mind me, i'm looking at my logo in action

[left grove]

Oh might need a safemilk watermark too

[broken scaffold]

Question

WHy is the safe milk watermark not a milk carton of some kind?

[unborn tusk]

milk carton wearing armor lol

[amber atlas]

haha i think he's just having some fun and practicing with that one, i dont have watermarks currently for anything i do XD

i had a logo a long time ago that was a milk carton on a bear trap

but i still have it sitting around somewhere

[broken scaffold]

Isn't that the opposite of safe??

[amber atlas]

I don't think anyone is going to try and get it if it's on a beartrap ;3

[neat spindle]

Trying to do a geometry study of an image with parallax makes me want to fucking kill myself, lol

[neat spindle]

Good news, not dead and the first layer of the tracery is done

[neat spindle]

Needs a little tweaking in some of the trefoil details, but it's basically there

[neat spindle]

First pass on making it a material. I'm not completely happy with the simplistic moulding I did around the outside, might go back and redo it.

[left grove]

Nice! It's getting there

[neat spindle]

So much of the little detail work I put in doesn't even show because these things are put in the least lit parts of the map, unfortunately

[tame shard]

for artistic effect, maybe the green window behind it should be emissive? that would bring attention to your details, maybe even cast some neat shadows...also, are you using height maps to do depth, and it's just not visible in the dark?

[neat spindle]

The green is already emissive, that's why it's visible. I could crank it up to cast more light, but it's supposed to be night so wouldn't make sense for it to be too bright. And yeah, I'm using a height map, that corner of the map just doesn't have much in the way of light.

[nocturne vigil]

I just wanted to stop by and show my support. This is one of my all-time favorite games! Thank you very much.

[spice oriole]

The green glass part is the original texture? Or as I see both windows has this dark/shadow/AO blurry part which why the framing gets lost in the shot.
Cheat a little, show those geometries.

[neat spindle]

The glass is from scratch as part of the materials. I darkened the recesses and made it less reflective around the edges to represent grime settling in there. It looks really unnatural without that

[spice oriole]

I get it. It just looks too smooth and 100% dark.

I found this as ref. Se like here there is grime in the corners but with variations and it doesn't cover up completely.

[neat spindle]

That picture's also taken in the middle of the day in full sunlight, the game is set at night with only street lights for the ambient light. Most of my micro detail on the glass is in the roughness map, it's an effect that looks better in motion.

[spice oriole]

Sure. Maybe in motion it's better. I just talked about shapes and values to help make it even better.

[neat spindle]

Fed some of the roughness data into the emissive map so now the dust and grime on the panes reduces the glow

Also dropped in a few primitives to give some more control over the lighting from the windows

[hidden helm]

Hey guys, pretty new here and I just wanted to say hi! I currently work in the videogame industry as a level artist but I always been obsessed with VTMB. Got Remix running last night and would love to help out!

[neat spindle]

Welcome! If you haven't already, check out our GitHub repo in the pins, we have a base build set up with some settings configured, textures flagged, etc. Beyond that, we've basically just been picking a level or two to use as showcases and chugging away at them as fancies our interest.

It'll be nice having another real artist on board, haha, I'm in way over my head on this stuff

Also @amber atlas , hope you're doing alright, sounds like you've had a pretty rough year

[amber atlas]

Just a lot of funerals and projects D:

I'm chipping away at it, got a big swath of content coming up actually, in the home stretch of that.
Went from just being sm_diner_1 to including a lot of other stuff!

Also trying not to neglect HL2 RTX tasks, but I've been really lagging on that D:

Also helping a friend out finish HIS mod which is a totally different thing. So it's like 16 hour days every day!

[neat spindle]

Oh, just saw this: #1377779743235244163 message

I think some of the materials I've made appear in Asylum if you'd like them

[hidden helm]

Got a few questions for you all but let me know if this isnt the right place to ask 🙂

So I added a small placeholder as a test to familiarize myself with the workflow but I was wondering how much we need to optimize assets. As far as I can tell theres no virtual geometry like UE5 so im guessing I shouldnt be beveling every little edges but how detailed can I go? Also is there anything I should be aware of while working on a scene?

[cosmic spear]

#asset-creation message
This should give you an idea of how much detail you can use.
From what I understand, you don't want to go too crazy, but you can definitely afford to use more polys than you might otherwise be used to.

[hidden helm]

thanks for quick answer ❤️

[amber atlas]

Thing to note, almost all the doors in vtmb are brush based with a few exceptions. this means they will most likely not have stable hashes so they won't be instances like the models will be. it also means that at certain angles they may switch to a different hash and lose their remastered replacement.

My general rule for myself has been to remaster things like doors as just the textures. So no mesh replacements for things like brushes.

If you do mat_wireframe 1, anything outlined blue will be a mesh, anything gray will be a brush.

This also means you'll have to remaster every door individually instead of just the texture once that then applies to all doors.

Side note, nice model.

The being said, the workflow I use actually includes modeling the door for the high poly and using that to bake down for the base for texturing, so if you use it that way you can get the height map for the POM shader going, and that can actually do a lot of the heavy lifting even if its a brush

additionally in this example you can see there's some stuff like the frame and the door that are different types of data, but share the same texture hash ID's

So when I redo the door/frame/connected wall, I make sure to do it all at once, THEN, if there are opportunities for custom models, I do those after and sepearate them fully from each other.

better example i have here

door frame is model, door is brush, both share a texture so i did the door/frame/wall texture FIRST, then remodeled the door frame and added all the stuff i wanted, then made a separate texture for that, so now they are referencing seperate things

also for the sake of completeness, characters are curretly unable to be remastered, there are some hurdles there, but there are some various possible fixes to that, just currently still a blocker

hope that gives you a rundown of some of the limitations vtmb is presenting with the remix replacement flow

[hidden helm]

Omg thanks for all of this,this is really useful

[hidden helm]

so basically, most walls and doors cant be "remodeled" what If I want to add a trim to a wall with geo? Would that work?

[amber atlas]

you would need to find something considered a 'stable anchor' meaning it needs to basically be a mesh that only appears ONCE in the entire game AND doesn't cull, or potentially a light or something that doesn't cull too immediately

its a very sticky situation

i did do an experiement with a door where i replaced it with a mesh, but only one side of it showed up, and it would disappear from the other side and go back to being the old brush based door

it also didn't remaster the other doors in the level except one side of one other door sometimes

you might have better luck, but after that i've stuck to just pushing the height map to the limits for brushes

you can push the heightmaps really far though

[hidden helm]

interesting...! thanks again

Ill play around and let you know what I come up with

[neat spindle]

Yeah, the main issue with using deep displacement maps is that the edge "faces" will be visibly stretched, but you can be strategic about putting it where nobody will notice.

[odd cove]

Can someone confirm that Remix 1.0.0 doesn't work with VTMB? I've tried:

• different permutations of launch options
• installed with unofficial patch plus extras, patch without extras, no patch at all
• no rtx.conf, or rtx.conf from either safemilk or catto's mods

Nothing works. I have gotten @amber atlas's and @left grove 's mods working, no issues there. But I don't know what version of Remix they're using. Looks like the NVidia app will only let you download Remix 1.0.0 now, but I want to start contributing.

[neat spindle]

I use Remix 1.0 with no issues, can you give any more information about how it's failing?

[odd cove]

Right now, I have unofficial patch installed with no extras. With launch options set to "-game Unofficial_Patch", I can see the intro videos, but it crashes when attempting to show the main menu.

When I add "-dxlevel 70" to launch options, the main menu will load, and I see the "Welcome to RTX Remix" notice up top. But upon clicking "New Game" (or trying to directly load map via console), it will start to load, and then crash. Either scenario, I get this popup.

I remembered I have visual studio installed. opening up the minidump from nvremixbridge.exe, I see this

re-opened to main menu to grab version number from dev menu: remix-1.0.0+69868e2e

[amber atlas]

@odd cove In my experience this often related to memory allocation stuff. It shows up as 'didn't have access to it' etc. It can mean a few things, in my experience so far with this software it means that you ran out of vram, even if you have enough I've noticed spikes in vram usage which can result in this.

I've also gotten this result when my drivers were at certain versions. I'm on a 5090 now (GPU failed last week) so I'm careful about being up to date on drivers since the newes 5090 drivers are unstable.

I'm running on version 1.0 of the remix toolkit. And semi latest versions of the runtime.

The mod I have currently released on the moddb is older, so it works with older drivers. But I found when switching to 1.0 stuff didn't work until I updated my nvidia drivers.

I always hate to give the generic statement of 'did you update your drivers' I feel like it's largely unhelpful, so I tried to include some extra context.

[odd cove]

All good! However, I am on the latest drivers (576.52). Running on a 4090 here, so VRAM should not be an issue.

I just tried switching back to the files in your mod, but I can't open up captures created with that runtime inside of Remix toolkit 1.0. Blergh.

[amber atlas]

Hmm that's frustrating...
I'm going through some bad computer issues myself right now, had to replace some stuff, more parts on the way, but I basically BSOD constantly while trying to use Blender etc.
Oddly enough, I have a really stable time in the Remix Runtime and the Toolkit.

I actually have quite a few 'dead' captures in my list as well from when I captured on reallyyy super early versions of the runtime when we were all just figuring out how it worked.
I think some of my captures from pre 1.0 do work on 1.0 but it's sort of a grab bag and I usually just make new captures. I'm probably going to clear some of them in general and just keep the capture resource folders for textures etc.

[odd cove]

I restarted my computer... most of the same problems, but I was suddenly able to open one of my own captures. So that's new!

[amber atlas]

Finally rehooked up the Vampire project and such so that it runs again, still need to get the toolkit up and running etc.

Pulled the newest dvxk and bridge stuff, and now this happens:

All player faces have a stable hash but are no longer skinned and detach from the face, receive odd lighting as I move around etc.

going to try and narrow down if it's something I did when re setting up the project but I might make a bug for this one, going to try rolling back dvxk and bridge to the last stable one I was using and see if it persists

backing up to the previous stable one I had did fix it

[left grove]

Spooky, want me to try something as well?

[amber atlas]

@left grove It should be in theory easy to repro, it's the default un remastered player characters that are doing it now.

I basically just went on the github and downloaded the newest stuff to test it out.

https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/dxvk-remix/actions

under the top action, Build #858

filed a bug on it as well:
https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/rtx-remix/issues/869

@spice hemlock I'm not sure which merge this started happening but it's a pretty big show stopper.

Who can I elevate this to?

I'd love to take the 1.1 update to everything when it's finalized, but I don't want this bug to slip into the cracks and make it to official 1.1 whenever that's slated.

[spice hemlock]

Do you have any idea as to when that started happening? have you been using the regular Actions builds?

And is this only for the player character, or all skinned characters?

[left grove]

I have some free time I can try to narrow down when it started happening. Let me get set up and reproduce it on latest then work my way back (I might do a binary chop or so to make my life a little easier)

[left grove]

I got some footage of the behaviour, I am now going to test with older versions until I can narrow down when it started happening

[robust jewel]

help please

I can never get a proper visual

[left grove]

try using this rtx.conf

just put it on the main game folder

[robust jewel]

It hasn't changed, I can get the same video recording.

[left grove]

what GPU have you got?

I honestly am not too sure what else could cause that

and which version of unofficial patch are you using? (wonder if some newer one breaks things)

[robust jewel]

gpu 4070

unofficial 11.5

rtx remix bilgisayarımda kurulu dosya konumuna rtx modunu attım baska birsey yapmam gerekiyor mu

[left grove]

it's mostly it yes, you need to do 1 more thing

[robust jewel]

I put the rtx mod in the file location where rtx remix is ​​installed on my computer. Do I need to do anything else?

[left grove]

on steam you need to change the launch arguments to have -game Unofficial_Patch -dxlevel 70 -mat_dxlevel 70 -window +r_frustumcullworld 0 +mat_softwarelighting 0 r_3dsky 1 +mat_picmip 0 -novid

[robust jewel]

Sorry, I posted it without translating it.

[left grove]

I used google translate